BRINGING ‘H’ BACK IN HR - TALENT ACQUISITION

In the pursuit for new ways to increase productivity, efficiency and improve the candidate experience, there’s no doubt that artificial intelligence is great news for HR. However, automation cannot replace the old fashioned personal interaction to recruit effectively. At the 7th Human Capital Conclave under the theme, ‘Bringing the ‘H’ back to HR’, organized by the NHRD Network at The Leela Ambience, Gurugram, panelists agreed that recruiters who augment technological approaches with a more personal touch are the clear winners

Biplob Banerjee: A very generic question to begin with but what do the panellists think of the topic, “Bringing the ‘H’ back to HR”?

Raj Raghavan: Many years ago, when I worked for Ford Motor Company, this story was often repeated there. There was a time when the American automobile industry was really struggling, competing with Japanese automobile companies. The Japanese automobiles were built to last, they consumed less fuel, they were sturdy... everything about them was fantastic and the Americans just bought the Japanese auto parts. Then the US brought in trade sanctions. What that meant was that if you don’t manufacture in the US then you will not be able to sell. So Toyota decided to start manufacturing in the US.

Most US companies were bankrupt those days and the only company that had money then was General Motors and they said before those guys come here let’s go and find out what they do there. So they went there and saw the Japanese had an absolutely fantastic technology which GM also had and they had machines which again GM had.

But when the team came back, they realized that GM did not have the kind of people that Toyota had. So they spent $40 billion and upgraded their machinery and technology.

When Toyota came into the US to start manufacturing, they rented GM’s manufacturing plant, which had earlier shut down. And since they were not allowed to hire people from Japan, they hired the same people who were laid off by GM before the plant was shut down.

In two years’ time, the Toyota plant in the US was the best in terms of people and productivity.

So what did Toyota do for its success? The CFO from GM who had invested $40 billion realized that Toyota treated people differently. Technology is important, but in this case, for example, the introduction of the Andon system which empowers the employee to stop work during the operation, if a defect is found, builds up confidence and gives him a sense of belonging to the organization.

"Provide HR professionals with the tools they need to be more strategic and insightful when making hiring decisions. They look at a candidate’s social media profiles to get a better picture of their actual personality. But only when HR professionals interact with prospective employees in person, they get a real feel of the candidate"

- Rachna Mukherjee

Rachna Mukherjee: What strikes me is an analogy with the medical profession and the way it has evolved. Earlier, doctors had their individual way of diagnosis. Today, we have a plethora of scans and tests for doctors to gauge illnesses. Similarly, talent acquisition has become a very proactive and strategic part of HR. Advances in talent data analytics and AI

Provide HR professionals with the tools they need to be more strategic and insightful when making hiring decisions. They look at a candidate’s social media profiles to get a better picture of their actual personality. But only when HR professionals interact with prospective employees in person, they get a real feel of the candidate.

Harrish M. Bhatia: Many resumes come to you when you are recruiting. The average time spent by a person scanning resumes, I think, is from as low as 20 seconds to as high as two minutes to decide whether the person should be called for an interview.

AI helps you reduce the time taken to find the profile that you are looking for, the skills that you are asking and the knowledge that you want the person to have. But having said that as Rachna pointed out, human interaction is a critical component of the talent search process. Without meeting a person, it is very difficult to tell what the person is really like and to determine the person’s soft skills such as confidence, compassion, leadership and communication.

When it comes to connecting with employees, many times the HR connects only with the employees in ways such as celebrating the employee’s birthday, celebrating the employee’s marriage anniversary, taking employees out for trips or excursions. But when people leave the organization, one thing they generally tell their families and friends is that the company is stupid and the boss is lousy. So I thought how do you counter that?

So I started a concept called family connect, wherein I am not just celebrating the employee’s birthday but I am celebrating his father’s and mother’s birthdays also. So that the family at least gets the message that the organization is good and the boss is not bad as opposed to the picture painted by the employee. After two or three years, the result was that the attrition rate had come down. If the entire organization’s attrition rate was 20 per cent then the attrition rate of key employees (who are 20 per cent of the staff driving 80 per cent of the business) was only one per cent. And if these employees are stable the organization will always be stable.

While technological processes help speed up processes, businesses are run by people who drive the culture of the organization and make the company brand. So those people who are running the show are stable, the organization will automatically grow. That’s what I would like to say of technology and the human factor.

Thakur: If we go back to our first jobs the person recruiting us was god for us. So in my mind in talent acquisition, the recruiter is a god. Harrish just spoke about putting the employee at the centre, so the second point in my mind is how do I design talent acquisition with the candidate at the centre? Also, between an interviewer and an interviewee: Who is more powerful? You may feel it is the interviewer but it is actually the interviewee who can reject the offer. This is empowerment like what the Japanese had (as mentioned by Raj) for their employees. As leaders, we should give our recruiters the empowerment to take decisions. If we keep this in mind, the element of H in talent acquisition and in human resources stays. Also, talent acquisition is one process where maximum digitization has happened till now. Hence, if you use both very well-H and AI-then it can be an immensely powerful mechanism.

How do you (Raj) see talent acquisition evolve over the years and your experience in each of the companies you worked for?

Raghavan: Many years ago, at GE, I was given charge of a joint venture that GE was forming. My then boss at GE told me that the JV partners wanted to talk to me to find out if I was good enough for the job. Now this official, from the partner company was based out of the US, and he wanted to talk to me at 1 am. The official, who too was an Indian, said that since it was his lunchtime, I should not get upset if I heard him munching. So I said to him, “No, not at all but I want you to know that this is my sleep time and if I start snoring.”

From there on HR has come a long way. We don’t do that kind of stupid stuff anymore.

At Amazon, one of the things they said when they started the company in 1996 is that they wanted to hire such great people that their present staff would look up to the new employee and get to learn new things. Amazon calls it raising the bar. So when I was about 3-4 years old in Amazon, I would thank god that I was hired earlier because if I had to be hired today, I wouldn’t probably be hired because the bar just keeps going up and up.

Being a tech company, Amazon uses technology very well in talent acquisition. If there were five of us interviewing a candidate then each of us had to make copious notes. Not just write yes or no on the resume. We had to instead make those notes and then fill it onto an online system. At the end of it, one had to push a button that would basically say inclined to hire or not inclined to hire. Now till the time I vote, I would not be able to see what the other four had written and the same applied to them as well. This was done so that none of us was influenced by the others’ decisions. So this was something very specific in spite of technology.

The focus of all the organizations that I worked in Eicher, Bausch and Lomb, GE, Microsoft and now Accenture is on hiring the best talent to help the organization reach its business goals. And that is a fundamental thing that has not changed in HR

- Rohit Thakur

Your (Rohit) experience in talent acquisition.

Thakur: Though technology is transforming talent acquisition, finding and hiring ideal job candidates is a very demanding job. Employee selection in human resource management is critical to a company’s success and recruiters are going head over heels to track down and engage the very best talent in the industry. The focus of all the organizations that I worked in Eicher, Bausch and Lomb, GE, Microsoft and now Accenture is on hiring the best talent to help the organization reach its business goals. And that is a fundamental thing that has not changed in HR.

What are the qualities you (Rachna) look for?

Mukherjee: When I am meeting or assessing people or taking a decision, one of the things I look for is, what has been their learning journey and what has been their learning agility. Of course, everybody learns from their achievements but I am very focused on how people learn from their failures. And that is something huge because it brings in an element of humility in them and that helps them look at things in a different way. Also, when talking to applicants, it is important to consider whether they will be able to adapt to your way of doing business or your office culture.

When I was hired at Microsoft, my hiring manager sitting in Seattle sent me this long mail with the subject line reading: ‘Microsoft needs you’. He then wrote a whole para on how he has evolved in the organization and how careers evolve and how one can add value and learn. Now nothing can substitute this feeling of being valued. Technology cannot make you feel valued. However, what technology can do is sharpen the decision making process for you. There are a whole lot of AI tools that look at a candidate’s social media profile. However, how authentic is the social media profile-is it the candidate’s thought or a borrowed thought; is it written by the candidate or by somebody else - are things that have to be determined. This is where the H in HR holds a valuable role.

What is absolutely critical when you (Harrish) are hiring?

Bhatia: When you are hiring, one of the first things that crosses your mind is that whatever be the requirement of the job the person that you are hiring has real energy and a very right attitude. Whatever your qualifications and whatever words you may use in your resume, if your energy levels are not right and if your attitude is not positive then no amount of AI can help you settle in any organization.

We all hire specialists. What are the things that you (Harrish) keep in mind when you hire that kind of talent?

Bhatia: Many times we have a killer resume followed by a perfect interview. We use psychometric tests to find out how the candidate is going to react to specific situations. These processes are followed in order to hire the right person who has the qualifications, skills, experience, and mindset we want to see in the perfect employee. But at the end of the day, at whatever level we are hiring, the person brings in his own set of ideas, his own experiences, his own culture, his own upbringing, to the table. And if that does not fit in with the company’s style, it will be a loss for the person because he is a misfit, as well as a loss for the organization as the business cycle will be disturbed.

So one has to be very careful and every aspect- from resumes to personal interviews to reference checks-is critical. Again, one needs to have an understanding of the human being. One meeting is not enough, you need to meet two to three times to find out if this is the person you need. I would place a lot of emphasis on personal interactions when hiring.

Your (Raj) inputs... from hiring at Amazon to hiring pilots.

Raghavan: In my experience not just at Amazon and GE but at Indigo too, I always tell candidates to get a good perspective of what it is like to work in the company. As a recruiter, I ask candidates to consider X Y Z things before they decide to come and work for us. Because for all you know it may or may not work.

Let me give the example of how we hire airport managers at Indigo. Now as airport managers, they are responsible for the operations of the entire airport and it will be their decisions that will run the whole facility. Every personnel working at the airport will report to them and nothing can happen without their approval. In small airports like Bagdogra or Tirupati or Hubli, where we do about three or four flights a day, airport managers are treated as super humans.

In this role, it is crucial to like working with people and give feedback at the right time. So one of the things I do, when I call people for interviews is to observe how they behave to better understand (his or her) interpersonal skills and personality. Are they are treating my security guard or personal assistant and others respectfully? Do they have good people skills? We do not want hard-nosed achievers, we want people who have a certain amount of humanity. In the case of pilots, we do a lot of psychometrics as we do not want them to do what the co-pilot of the low-cost carrier owned by the German airline Lufthansa did in 2015. So while hiring pilots we are very careful about their mental stability.

"To my mind, what machines can do human beings should not do. This means there are certain things that machines can do really well and we should not be putting humans on those jobs. What machines cannot do is what humans should be doing"

- Raj Raghavan

Where should we use psychometric tests and how successful are these in the Indian context because the tests are mainly designed in the West?

Raghavan: These tests should be taken for its worth. It doesn’t matter where it was created.

The benefits of psychometrics might start at recruitment, but it definitely doesn’t end there.

To better understand the sprawling workforce at Amazon, Jeff Bezos once said: ‘If my customer can tell me what she thinks right away, why can’t my employees?’

So we came up with small pilots of a daily Q&A programme at Amazon. The questions were typically work-related, with topics ranging from thoughts about their managers to the length of meetings and so on.

So, one of the questions we asked the staff at the fulfillment centres, which are huge warehouses, was whether their managers yelled at them. Our intent was to find out who is an abusive manager. In one particular area, nine out of the ten responses were yes. And we were really very concerned. So when we asked them, why does your manager yell at you? They said that since the shop floor is a very noisy place; if the manager doesn’t yell out their names, they will never be able to hear her and respond. So, the thing is eight out of ten times you get some real answers from psychometrics.

Mukherjee: Psychometric tests are used in recruitment because companies want a means of fairly and accurately predicting which applicants are likely to be successful in a particular job, I would say we need to pick the best. We also need to know that it is validated and will provide value to the organization.

Bhatia: Many things are made in the West but we are using them in India. So the same applies to psychometric tests as well. Psychometric tests are common and they give us an insight into the factors that influence a person’s performance in the workplace, which is why they are a useful tool in the talent selection process. But they are not the final thing that will make you want to hire a potential employee. Hence, the human interface is required and background checks are important for judging the real person.

How much importance do you give to reference checks?

Mukherjee: Reference check is an important tool available for assessment. However, the reference check needs to be done with extreme care. The informal reference checks need to be dealt with very carefully. When you reach a person informally (for reference check) you do not know whether that person is a friend or a co-worker of the candidate. So reaching per se whoever the candidate has referred to is important and then, I think, the whole art lies in the probing part. When you probe and ask the right questions, you will get a lot out of it. But then reference checking has to be taken as one of the inputs in the entire selection process and not as the only thing.

Thakur: In India, very often the moment an application is received, reference checking begins with hiring managers or recruiters calling up former or present organizations of the applicant. The sneakiness of the whole process is perplexing to me. Moreover, recruiters should know that anyone who applies has an expectation that their candidacy will be held in strict confidence.

As HR leaders, we have the responsibility to advise our CEOs and hiring managers about the rules for conducting reference checks and maintaining candidate’s confidentiality.

As a job applicant, I am willing to provide you with references. If you ask me for references from all my managers, I am absolutely fine with that. What I am not okay with is somebody just calling up behind my back and doing a reference check without my knowledge or consent. So recruiters should be as clear and honest with their candidates as possible. To make the most of the reference checks you are doing, what matters are the questions you ask when you call references. Asking questions that will give you the best insight into a potential candidate’s dependability and skills will help you gather meaningful information for making informed hiring decisions.

Now closing thoughts on the discussion.

Mukherjee: Technology is here to stay and technology is only to aid and supplement the decision making processes in talent acquisition. What we use and how we use it is really important. Using AI-based apps to sharpen the decision-making process without leaving behind the human part is the essence.

Thakur: Talent acquisition as a process may touch 10,000 people if I want to hire 1,000 people. So looking at talent acquisition as that engine that will be impacting our employer brand is something that we as HR professionals and leaders have to look into.

"AI helps you reduce the time taken to find the profile that you are looking for, the skills that you are asking and the knowledge that you want the person to have. But having said that, human interaction is a critical component of the talent search process"

- Haarish Bhatia

Bhatia: Automation is good for us because it helps expedite and better handle repetitive tasks without errors while giving us more space and time to make personal and lasting connections and build relationships with other humans. So I would say both are important in an age of automation. When you ask about how to retain employees, it is the induction process that is the key. By effectively planning employee induction and adding a personal touch to the process, you can increase your employee retention and ensure that you are getting the most out of your people.

Raghavan: To my mind, what machines can do human beings should not do. This means there are certain things that machines can do really well and we should not be putting humans on those jobs. What machines cannot do is what humans should be doing. So we need to be able to make that clear distinction. Having said this, a lot of times machines do what humans teach and train them to do. So whatever bias humans have, machines too will have the same bias.

So, let us not think of machines and humans as two independent things-they are very interdependent. End of the day the human brain is far more superior because the human brain teaches the machine what it needs to do. My view is that we need to use both in a discreet, thoughtful way that is long-lasting than just have machines instead of people in talent acquisition or anything else.